Last week, Kaminario CEO Dani Golan presented at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day in San Jose. The event afforded us the opportunity to have conversations with several data storage bloggers including Howard Marks, Nigel Poulton, Chris Evans, Ray Lucchesi, Robin Harris and Hans DeLeenheer to name a few.

I was fortunate to be in the room, and the feedback I heard is gratifying. In fact, DeLeenheer published his thoughts about Kaminario in his blog and said we were worth watching.

In addition to providing a K2 product overview, Golan shared insights about the SSD market and where Kaminario fits. “Solid-state storage is the biggest storage revolution in the last 30 years…one of the biggest in IT since virtualization.”

One of the effects of this revolution is that definitions for high end, mid range and low end are being turned on their head. Improving price/performance and increasing application requirements make it tough to distinguish among tier 0, tier 1, tier 2 etc. I would argue “that our software stack is far superior to a $3 million high-end [HDD] array,” Golan said.

Interestingly, Golan noted that when the company began speaking with potential customers early on, the most surprising thing was the level of interest among startups. Startups typically do not have legacy SAN environments and large IT staffs. These organizations wanted SSD performance rather than investing in older HDD technology and wanted something simple to deploy.

Poulton and others asked questions about Kaminario’s market focus and why the company has not yet integrated deduplication.

“We are aiming at the enterprise market,” Golan said. “That is our focus.” With regard to dedupe, he said that is coming, but Kaminario first wanted to focus on fundamental capabilities such as scale-out architecture and data protection so that the K2 would fit in mission-critical environments for OLTP, OLAP and other applications on both physical and virtual servers.

Golan also said that “Kaminario is 100 percent a software company.” This delivers many customer benefits because it can ease scalability and adapt well to hardware innovations such as increased density and new networking capabilities. There is a real power in being a software play in this space because of the flexibility it offers. Kaminario is only at the beginning of qualifying all kinds of applications and hardware combinations that ultimately will deliver value to customers, especially enterprises that have multi-storage vendor environments.

Watch Golan’s presentation in full below for additional details plus highlights of Kaminario’s SPEAR and DataProtect technologies.

Tags: Database Performance, Disk latency, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, Foskett, IOPS, Kaminario, Tech Field Day